Jethro Tull can be booked through this site. Jethro Tull entertainment booking site. Jethro Tull
is available for public concerts and events. Jethro Tull can be booked for
private events and Jethro Tull can be booked for corporate events and
meetings through this Jethro Tull booking page.

Unlike most middle agents that would mark
up the performance or appearance fee for Jethro Tull, we act as YOUR agent in
securing Jethro Tull at the best possible price. We go over the rider for
Jethro Tull and work directly with Jethro Tull or the responsible agent for
Jethro Tull to secure the talent for your event. We become YOUR agent,
representing YOU, the buyer.

In fact, in most cases we can negotiate for
the acquisition of Jethro Tull for international dates and newer promoters
providing you meet professional requirements.

Jethro Tull Biography

Jethro Tull was a unique phenomenon in popular music history.
Their mix of hard rock; folk melodies; blues licks; surreal, impossibly
dense lyrics; and overall profundity defied easy analysis, but that
didn't dissuade fans from giving them 11 gold and five platinum albums.
At the same time, critics rarely took them seriously, and they were off
the cutting edge of popular music since the end of the 1970s. But no
record store in the country would want to be without multiple copies of
each of their most popular albums (Benefit, Aqualung, Thick as a Brick,
Living in the Past), or their various best-of compilations, and few
would knowingly ignore their newest releases. Of their contemporaries,
only Yes could claim a similar degree of success, and Yes endured
several major shifts in sound and membership in reaching the 1990s,
while Tull remained remarkably stable over the same period. As
co-founded and led by wildman-flautist-guitarist-singer-songwriter Ian
Anderson, the group carved a place all its own in popular music.
Tull had its roots in the British blues boom of the late '60s. Anderson
(b. Aug. 10, 1947, Edinburgh, Scotland) had moved to Blackpool when he
was 12. His first band was called the Blades, named after James Bond's
club, with Michael Stephens on guitar, Jeffrey Hammond-Hammond (b. July
30, 1946) on bass and John Evans (b. Mar. 28, 1948) on drums, playing a
mix of jazzy blues and soulful dance music on the northern club
circuit. In 1965, they changed their name to the John Evan Band (Evan
having dropped the s in his name at Hammond's suggestion) and later
the John Evan Smash. By the end of 1967, Glenn Cornick (b. Apr. 24,
1947, Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, England) had replaced Hammond-Hammond
on bass. The group moved to Luton in order to be closer to London, the
center of the British blues boom, and the band began to fall apart,
when Anderson and Cornick met guitarist/singer Mick Abrahams (b. Apr.
7, 1943, Luton, Bedfordshire, England) and drummer Clive Bunker (b.
Dec. 12, 1946), who had previously played together in the Toggery Five
and were now members of a local blues band called McGregor's Engine.

In December of 1967, the four of them agreed to form a new group. They
began playing two shows a week, trying out different names, including
Navy Blue and Bag of Blues. One of the names that they used, Jethro
Tull, borrowed from an 18th-century farmer/inventor, proved popular and
memorable, and it stuck. In January of 1968, they cut a rather
derivative pop-folk single called Sunshine Day, released by MGM
Records (under the misprinted name Jethro Toe) the following month. The
single went nowhere, but the group managed to land a residency at the
Marquee Club in London, where they became very popular.

Early on, they had to face a problem of image and configuration,
however. In the late spring of 1968, managers Terry Ellis and Chris
Wright (who later founded Chrysalis Records) first broached the idea
that Anderson give up playing the flute, and to allow Mick Abrahams to
take center stage. At the time, a lot of blues enthusiasts didn't
accept wind instruments at all, especially the flute, as seminal to the
sound they were looking for, and as a group struggling for success and
recognition, Jethro Tull was just a little too strange in that regard.
Abrahams was a hardcore blues enthusiast who idolized British blues
godfather Alexis Korner, and he was pushing for a more traditional band
configuration, which would've put him and his guitar out front. As it
turned out, they were both right. Abrahams' blues sensibilities were
impeccable, but the audience for British blues by itself couldn't
elevate Jethro Tull any higher than being a top club act. Anderson's
antics on-stage, jumping around in a ragged overcoat and standing on
one leg while playing the flute, and his use of folk sources as well as
blues and jazz, gave the band the potential to grab a bigger audience
and some much-needed press attention.

They opened for Pink Floyd on June 29, 1968, at the first free rock
festival in London's Hyde Park, and in August they were the hit of the
Sunbury Jazz & Blues Festival in Sunbury-on-Thames. By the end of
the summer, they had a recording contract with Island Records. The
resulting album, This Was, was issued in November. By this time,
Anderson was the dominant member of the group on-stage, and at the end
of the month Abrahams exited the band. The group went through two
hastily recruited and rejected replacements, future Black Sabbath
guitarist Tony Iommi (who was in Tull for a week, just long enough to
show up in their appearance on the Rolling Stones' Rock 'N Roll Circus
extravaganza), and Davy O'List, the former guitarist with the Nice.
Finally, Martin Barre (b. Nov. 17, 1946), a former architecture
student, was the choice for a permanent replacement.

It wasn't until April of 1969 that This Was got a U.S. release.
Ironically, the first small wave of American Jethro Tull fans were
admiring a group whose sound had already changed radically; in May of
1969, Barre's first recording with the group, Living in the Past,
reached the British number three spot and the group made its debut on
Top of the Pops performing the song. The group played a number of
festivals that summer, including the Newport Jazz Festival. Their next
album, Stand Up, with all of its material (except Bouree, which was
composed by Johann Sebastian Bach) written by Ian Anderson, reached the
number one spot in England the next month. Stand Up also contained the
first orchestrated track by Tull, Reasons for Waiting, which featured
strings arranged by David Palmer, a Royal Academy of Music graduate and
theatrical conductor who had arranged horns on one track from This Was.
Palmer would play an increasingly large role in subsequent albums, and
finally join the group officially in 1977.

Meanwhile, Sweet Dream, issued in November, rose to number seven in
England, and was the group's first release on Wright and Ellis' newly
formed Chrysalis label. Their next single, The Witch's Promise, got
to number four in England in January of 1970. The group's next album,
Benefit, marked their last look back at the blues, and also the
presence of Anderson's longtime friend and former bandmate John Evan --
who had long since given up the drums in favor of keyboards -- on piano
and organ. Benefit reached the number three spot in England, but, much
more important, it ascended to number 11 in America, and its songs,
including Teacher and Sossity, You're A Woman, formed a key part of
Tull's stage repertory. In early July of 1970, the group shared a bill
with Jimi Hendrix, B.B. King, and Johnny Winter at the Atlanta Pop
Festival in Byron, GA, before 200,000 people.

By the following December, after another U.S. tour, Cornick had decided
to leave the group, and was replaced on bass by Anderson's childhood
friend Jeffrey Hammond-Hammond. Early the following year, they began
working on what would prove to be, for many fans, the group's magnum
opus, Aqualung. Anderson's writing had been moving in a more serious
direction since the group's second album, but it was with Aqualung that
he found the lyrical voice he'd been seeking. Suddenly, he was singing
about the relationship between man and God, and the manner in which --
in his view -- organized religion separated them. The blues influences
were muted almost to non-existence, but the hard rock passages were
searing and the folk influences provided a refreshing contrast. That
the album was a unified whole impressed the more serious critics, while
the kids were content to play air guitar to Martin Barre's high-speed
breaks. And everybody, college prog rock mavens and high-school
time-servers alike, seemed to identify with the theme of alienation
that lay behind the music.

Aqualung reached number seven in America and number four in England,
and was accompanied by a hugely successful American tour. Bunker quit
the band to get married, and was replaced by Anderson's old John Evan
Smash bandmate Barriemore Barlow (b. Sept. 10, 1949). Late in 1971,
they began work on their next album, Thick as a Brick. Structurally
more ambitious than Aqualung, and supported by an elaborately designed
jacket in the form of a newspaper, this record was essentially one long
song steeped in surreal imagery, social commentary, and Anderson's
newly solidified image as a wildman-sage. Released in England during
April of 1972, Thick as a Brick got as high as the number five spot,
but when it came out in America a month later, it hit the number one
spot, making it the first Jethro Tull album to achieve greater
popularity in American than in England. In June of 1972, in response to
steadily rising demand for the group's work, Chrysalis Records released
Living in the Past, a collection of tracks from their various singles
and British EPs, early albums, and a Carnegie Hall show, packaged like
an old-style 78 rpm album in a book that opened up.

At this point, it seemed as though Jethro Tull could do no wrong, and
for the fans that was true. For the critics, however, the group's
string ran out in July of 1973 with the release of A Passion Play. The
piece was another extended song, running the length of the album, this
time steeped in fantasy and religious imagery far denser than Aqualung;
it was divided at the end of one side of the album and the beginning of
the other by an A.A. Milne-style story called The Hare That Lost His
Spectacles. This time, the critics were hostile toward Anderson and
the group, attacking the album for its obscure lyrical references and
excessive length. Despite these criticisms, the album reached number
one in America (yielding a number eight single edited from the extended
piece) and number 13 in England. The real venom, however, didn't start
to flow until the group went on tour that summer. By this time, their
sets ran to two-and-a-half hours, and included not only the new album
done in its entirety ( The Hare That Lost His Spectacles being a film
presentation in the middle of the show), but Thick As a Brick and the
most popular of the group's songs off of Aqualung and their earlier
albums. Anderson was apparently unprepared for the searing reviews that
started appearing, and also took the American rock press too seriously.
In the midst of a sell-out U.S. tour, he threatened to cancel all
upcoming concerts and return to England. Fortunately, cooler heads
prevailed, especially once he recognized that the shows were completely
sold out and audiences were ecstatic, and the tour continued without
interruption.

It was 16 months until the group's next album, War Child -- conceived
as part of a film project that never materialized -- was released, in
November of 1974. The expectations surrounding the album gave it
pre-order sales sufficient to get it certified gold upon release, and
it was also Tull's last platinum album, reaching number two in America
and number 14 in England. The dominant theme of War Child seemed to be
violence, though the music's trappings heavily featured Palmer's
orchestrations, rivaling Barre's electric guitar breaks for attention.
In any case, the public seemed to respond well to the group's return to
conventional length songs, with Bungle in the Jungle reaching number
11 in America. Tull's successful concert tour behind this album had
them augmented by a string quartet.

During this period, Anderson became involved with producing an album by
Steeleye Span, a folk-rock group that was also signed to Chrysalis, and
who had opened for Tull on one of their American tours. Their music
slowly begun influencing Anderson's songwriting over the next several
years, as the folk influence grew in prominence, a process that was
redoubled when he took up a rural residence during the mid-'70s. The
next Tull album, Minstrel in the Gallery, showed up ten months later,
in September of 1975, reaching number seven in the United States. This
time, the dominant theme was Elizabethan minstrelsy, within an electric
rock and English folk context. The tracks included a 17-minute suite
that recalled the group's earlier album-length epic songs, but the
album's success was rather more limited.

The Jethro Tull lineup had been remarkably stable ever since Clive
Bunker's exit after Aqualung, remaining constant across four albums in
as many years. In January of 1976, however, Hammond-Hammond left the
band to pursue a career in art. His replacement, John Glascock (b.
1953), joined in time for the recording of Too Old to Rock 'n Roll, Too
Young to Die, an album made up partly of songs from an un-produced play
proposed by Anderson and Palmer, released in May of 1976. The group
later did an ITV special built around the album's songs. The title
track, however (on which Steeleye Span's Maddy Prior appeared as a
guest backing vocalist), became a subject of controversy in England, as
critics took it to be a personal statement on Anderson's part.

In late 1976, a Christmas EP entitled Ring Out Solstice Bells got to
number 28. This song later turned up on their next album, Songs From
the Wood, the group's most artistically unified and successful album in
some time (and the first not derived from an unfinished film or play
since A Passion Play). This was Tull's folk album, reflecting
Anderson's passion for English folk songs. Its release also accompanied
the band's first British tour in nearly three years. In May of 1977,
David Palmer joined Tull as an official member, playing keyboards
on-stage to augment the richness of the group's concert sound.

Having lasted into the late '70s, Jethro Tull now found itself
competing in a new musical environment, as journalists and, to an
increasing degree, fans became fixated on the growing punk rock
phenomenon. In October 1977, Repeat (The Best of Jethro Tull, Vol. 2),
intended to fill an anticipated 11 month gap between Tull albums, was
released on both sides of the Atlantic. Unfortunately, it contained
only a single new track and never made the British charts, while barely
scraping into the American Top 100 albums. The group's next new album,
Heavy Horses, issued in April of 1978, was Anderson's most personal
work in several years, the title track expressing his regret over the
disappearance of England's huge shire horses as casualties of
modernization. In the fall of 1978, the group's first full-length
concert album, the double-LP Live-Bursting Out, was released to modest
success, accompanied by a tour of the United States and an
international television broadcast from Madison Square Garden.

1979 was a pivotal and tragic year for the group. John Glascock died
from complications of heart surgery on November 17, five weeks after
the release of Stormwatch. Tull was lucky enough to acquire the
services of Dave Pegg, the longtime bassist for Fairport Convention,
which had announced its formal (though, as it turned out, temporary)
breakup. The Stormwatch tour with the new lineup was a success,
although the album was the first original release by Jethro Tull since
This Was not to reach the U.S. Top 20. Partly thanks to Pegg's
involvement with the Tull lineup, future tours by Jethro Tull,
especially in America, would provide a basis for performances by
re-formed incarnations of Fairport Convention.

The lineup change caused by Glascock's death led to Anderson's decision
to record a solo album during the summer of 1980, backed by Barre,
Pegg, and Mark Craney on drums, with ex-Roxy Music/King Crimson
multi-instrumentalist Eddie Jobson on violin. The record, A, was
eventually released as a Jethro Tull album in September of 1980, but
even the Tull name didn't do much for its success. Barlow, Evan, and
Palmer, however, were dropped from the group's lineup with the
recording of A, and the new version of Jethro Tull toured in support of
the album. Jobson left once the tour was over, and it was with yet
another new lineup -- including Barre, Pegg, and Fairport Convention
alumnus Gerry Conway (drums) and Peter-John Vettesse (keyboards) --
that The Broadsword and the Beast was recorded in 1982. Although this
album had many songs based on folk melodies, its harder rocking
passages also had a heavier, more thumping beat than earlier versions
of the band had produced, and the use of the synthesizer was more
pronounced than on previous Tull albums.

In 1983, Anderson confined his activities to his first official solo
album, Walk Into Light, which had a very different,
synthesizer-dominated sound. Following its lackluster performance,
Anderson revived Jethro Tull for the album Under Wraps, released in
September of 1984. At number 76 in the U.S., it became the group's
poorest selling album, partly a consequence of Anderson's developing a
throat infection that forced the postponement of much of their planned
tour. No further Tull albums were to be released until Crest of a Knave
in 1987, as a result of Anderson's intermittent throat problems. In the
meantime, the group appeared on a German television special in March of
1985, and participated in a presentation of the group's work by the
London Symphony Orchestra. To make up for the shortfall of new
releases, Chrysalis released another compilation, Original Masters, a
collection of highlights of the group's work, in October of 1985. In
1986, A Classic Case: The London Symphony Orchestra Plays the Music of
Jethro Tull was released on record; and Crest of a Knave performed
surprisingly well when it was issued in September of 1987, reaching
number 19 in England and number 32 in America with the support of a
world tour.

Crest of a Knave was something of a watershed in Tull's later history,
though nobody would have guessed it at the time of its release.
Although some of its songs displayed the group's usual folk/hard rock
mix, the group was playing louder than usual, and tracks like Steel
Monkey, had a harder sound than any previous record by the group. In
1988, Tull toured the United States as part of the celebration of the
band's 20th anniversary. In July, Chrysalis issued 20 Years of Jethro
Tull, a 65-song boxed-set collection covering the group's history up to
that time, containing most of their major songs and augmented with
outtakes and radio performances. In February of 1989, the band won the
Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance for Crest of a Knave.
Suddenly, they were stars again, and being declared as relevant by one
of the top music awards in the industry; a fact that kept critics
buzzing for months over whether the group deserved it before finally
attacking the voting for the Grammy Awards and the membership of its
parent organization, the National Association of Recording Arts and
Sciences.

Rock Island, another hard rocking album, reached a very healthy number
18 in England during September of the same year, while peaking only at
56 in America, despite a six-week U.S. tour to support the album. In
1990, the album Catfish Rising did less well, reaching only 27 in
England and 88 in America after its release in September. And A Little
Light Music, their own unplugged release, taped on their summer 1992
European tour, only got to number 34 in England and 150 in the United
States.

Despite declining numbers, the group continued performing to good-sized
houses when they toured, and the group's catalog performed extremely
well. In April of 1993, Chrysalis released a four-CD 25th Anniversary
Box Set -- evidently hoping that most fans had forgotten the 20th
anniversary set issued five years earlier -- consisting of remixed
versions of their hits, live shows from across their history, and a
handful of new tracks. Meanwhile, Anderson continued to write and
record music separate from the group on occasion, most notably
Divinities: Twelve Dances with God, a classically-oriented solo album
(and a distinctly non-Tull one) on EMI's classical Angel Records.
J-Tull.Com followed in 1999. ~ Bruce Eder, All Music GuideWritten by Bruce Eder

Book Jethro Tull here!

Book Jethro Tull for your next event! Would you like to have Jethro Tull perform at your next corporate event, party or concert? Simply fill out the simple interest form below, and we’ll start the booking process.

First Name:

Last Name:

Email:

Phone:

Date Of Event:
(If Known)

Type of Event:

Est. # of Attendees

City

State / Region

To prevent spam bots, please enter the code you see below in the box provided. Your message will not be sent without this code.

Entertainment Resource Group provides
talent acquisition services and concert management. We DO NOT claim to
represent ourselves as the exclusive agent, representative or management
of all of the artists on this site. We are the Buyers Agent. We act on
YOUR behalf for talent acquisition, concert management and event
production. All photos/images are
property of their respective owners and used for information and
reference only. All artist names fall under fair use laws. Images may
not be copied, modified or reused.

Consultation & Artist Info Packages fees are non-refundable. The information provided herein is the latest Artist Responsible Agent contact and historical information available to us. We research to make sure this is the most accurate information available. This information however, cannot be guaranteed due to potential changes in Artist representation or historical fees not yet published in the trade journals (see our www.entertainmentrg.com FAQ’s page for more details). Upon receipt of the information included in the Consultation & Artist Info Package, Buyer agrees that ERG has fulfilled its obligations under this agreement and releases ERG from any and all liability to the maximum extent allowed by law, and will indemnify and hold harmless ERG, its directors, officers, employees, and agents, from and against any and all claims arising from this agreement and subsequent event including but not limited to all third party claims, losses, damages, suits, fees, judgments, costs and expenses (collectively referred to as 'Claims'), including attorneys' fees incurred in responding to such Claims, that the parties may suffer or incur arising out of or in connection with (a) a party’s negligence, willful misconduct, or breach of any representation, warranty, or other obligation under this Agreement, or (b) any personal injury (including death) or damage to property resulting from a party or its agents' acts or omissions and standard force majeure. The parties will give prompt notice of any Claim to the other party, and the parties will defend the opposing party at their request. This Agreement will be governed by, construed and enforced in accordance with the laws of the State of NEVADA. (Tulip!)